THE MASSACRE AT EL MOZOTE
A Parable of the Cold War
By Mark Danner
Illustrated. 304 pages.
Vintage Books/Random House. Paperback, $12.

Once in a rare while a writer re-examines
a debated episode of recent history with such thoroughness and integrity
that the truth can no longer be in doubt. Mark Danner did just that in
a long article that took up most of last week's issue of The New Yorker.
Mr. Danner's subject was the massacre in December 1981 in the Salvadoran
village of El Mozote. Over the years politicians and journalists have
differed bitterly about what happened there -- who did the killing, indeed
whether there was a massacre at all. The argument is over now. After the
Danner report, no rational person can doubt that Salvadoran Government
forces carried out a massacre. They killed hundreds of people in El Mozote
and other hamlets nearby: men, women, children, infants. They killed with
a savagery that is hard even to read about. Chepe Mozote was 7 years old
at the time, one of a group of children taken by the soldiers to a playing
field near the school. He told Mr. Danner: "I didn't really understand
what was happening until I saw a soldier take a kid he had been carrying
-- maybe 3 years old -- throw him in the air and stab him with a bayonet.
They slit some of the kids' throats, and many they hanged from the tree.
. . . The soldiers kept telling us, 'You are guerrillas and this is justice.
This is justice.'

"Finally, there were only three of us left. I watched them hang my
brother.
He was 2 years old. I could see I was going to be killed soon, and I thought
it
would be better to die running, so I ran. . . ."

The killers were from the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion. Their commanders,
making a drive through territory where rebel forces had been, decided
to kill
everyone on the theory that the local population had nurtured the rebels.
In
fact, El Mozote was a stronghold of evangelical Christians, who were fiercely
anti-Communist.

A month after the massacre, in January 1982, guerrillas guided two reporters
and a photographer to El Mozote: Raymond Bonner of The New York Times,
Alma
Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post and the photographer Susan Meiselas.
The
reporters wrote stories of the bodies and destruction they saw, and The
Times
published harrowing pictures by Ms. Meiselas.

Reagan Administration officials denounced
the massacre reports as false. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal
attacked the reporters as "credulous" victims of Communist propaganda.
(Mr. Danner notes dryly that The Journal's long editorial took no note
of the fact that the correspondents they criticized had actually been
at the scene, and no note of Ms. Meiselas's photographs.)

Drawing on newly released documents and
his own follow-up interviews, Mr. Danner traces how the U.S. Government's
misleading denials of the massacre were created.

After the newspaper stories, the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador sent two
men to
investigate the alleged massacre: Todd Greentree, a young embassy official,
and
Marine Maj. John McKay. They got to within a few miles of El Mozote, but
the
Salvadoran Government forces taking them would go no farther.

Both men were convinced, from talks with refugees nearby, that something
terrible had happened. Major McKay told Mr. Danner he could feel "this
tremendous fear." Mr. Greentree said he concluded that "there
probably had been
a massacre."

But they had no firsthand evidence, and that was what the embassy cable
to
Washington said: "No evidence could be found to confirm that Government
forces
systematically massacred civilians." The Reagan Administration used
that line to
deny the massacre stories. Its interest was not in truth but in getting
Congress
to continue military aid to El Salvador.

The U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton, cabled the State Department
on Feb. 1, 1982, that his views should not be distorted -- that though
he had no
confirmation he did think "something happened" in El Mozote.
This cable, found
by Mr. Danner, was of course not disclosed at the time.

Some of the Americans who denied the massacre have come to regret their
actions and said so. Others, politicians and editors, have been unrepentant.
I
hope they will read Mr. Danner's report. They might try to read aloud,
to their
families, the passages about the killing of the children of El Mozote.